I wonder if former NDP premier Dan Miller sees the irony in his comments about teachers in his op-ed on Sunday.

He suggests they have no right to ask for salary increases of 13 per cent while at the same time pushing for studies into coal shipments and health. He suggests that taxation on coal shipments will help pay their salaries. He then notes that coal companies pay average wages estimated in 2011 of $95,000 per year.

Of course, teachers make nowhere near that kind of money. Is it not the role of such educated professionals to suggest we research anything that may be harmful to the health of students, or our planet?

I wonder if the $95,000 a year coal industry worker would last a day in one of today’s classrooms?

Why is it okay for coal miners to earn such vast sums and for B.C. teachers to be paid so much less than teachers in other parts of Canada?

Mavis Lowry, Vancouver

We’ve got to feed our kids

I continually find it astounding that many Vancouverites don’t — or won’t — recognize the simple truths that Dan Miller wrote about in his Sunday op-ed.

Hey, Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson! It’s Economics 101! Green is great but we have hungry children.

All we have to do is responsibly get our resources to the coast.

Marta McLaughlin, Vancouver

I need ‘medical cocaine’

Yet another sign that the world is going down the toilet at an ever-increasing rate is that if you stick the word “medical” in front of anything nowadays you’re good to go, as in “medical” heroin.

I understand there’s a cure for the disease I have after being exposed to the deadly “Excessive Quantity Of BS” virus, it’s called — wait for it — medical cocaine!

It’s nearly impossible to understand how killing your own daughter in such an inhumane manner is going to make anything right.

George Pearson, Surrey

Butt out, Tutu

Oilsands critic Desmond Tutu should go back to Africa and do something useful, such as helping to rescue the young girls kidnapped in Nigeria. We do not need him in Canada talking about things he knows little about and telling us how to run our country.

Jack Carradice, Chilliwack

Minimum wage too low?

I moved to Canada 15 years ago when the minimum wage was $8.50 an hour. Now it’s a massive $10.25. I dare you to show me another sector of the working community where wages over the same period have only increased by $1.75 an hour.

Minimum-wage workers normally also do not get pensions or benefits. If union leaders fought as hard for us minimum-wage workers as they do for pampered, self-indulgent public servants, maybe we’d now have a livable wage.

Eveline Lockhart, Salmon Arm

Taxpayers need relief

What is all this “us” and “them” in statements from many, including teachers, their union and school-board types like self-serving Vancouver school board chairwoman Patti Bacchus about the big bad government?

Friends, fellow citizens of B.C., lend me your ears! The “government’ is “us” and “them” is the teachers, their union and school boards all wanting our money, even if we don’t have it! Over-taxed taxpayers have to live within our incomes and don’t always get all we want or deserve because the money is nor there to pay for it!

The war being waged by teachers, their union and the Bacchus-types is not against government, it is against taxpayers.

Mai Willie, Coquitlam

Bargaining was working

Why do the media and Premier Christy Clark keep insisting that the B.C. Teachers’ Federation bargaining structure is broken and needs to be fixed and yet fail to mention that the BCTF and the B.C. Public School Employers’ Association had collaborated on a bargaining framework that resulted in the most productive bargaining in years?

Then the government fired the BCPSEA board and appointed Peter Cameron as the lead negotiator. Perhaps if the government hadn’t interfered, we wouldn’t be in the position we are today, with rotating strikes, a partial lockout and 10-per-cent wage cuts for teachers who are still teaching.

If students want to be mad at anyone, they should be mad at the government that has caused this mess. Vent your anger at them, not your teachers. Vote when you are of voting age and it never hurts to write to the education minister.

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